The Editor of Genius

It was Gertrude Stein and Scott Fitzgerald who christened the period. The hackneyed phrases "lost generation" and "The Jazz Age" still seem very real and important to Americans--the despair and romance of American letters in the '20s and early '30s continues to fascinate. Americans have eagerly poured over biographies of Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe and the like. Of the man who went so far toward establishing the reputation of these writers, however, little was known save scraps of stories and legends. Now, Scott Berg's biography goes far toward illuminating the life of Maxwell Perkins, an editor for Scribner's who came to occupy a unique position in the history of American literature and publishing.

The dearth of material on Perkins up till now has been a testimonial to the success of his obsessive search for anonymity, and it is fitting that Berg opens his book with an anecedote about it. He tells how Perkins, after arriving home late after giving a speech to a publishing class, finds one of his daughters waiting up for him.

"I gave a speech tonight and they called me 'the dean of American Editors,!" he explained. When they call you the dean, that means you're through."

"Oh Daddy, that doesn't mean you're through," she objected. "It means you've reached the top."

"No, "Perkins said flatly. "It means you're through."

That was in 1946. He had reached the top and although he would go on to skillfully edit James Jones' From Here to Eternity and Alan Paton's Cry, The Beloved Country in the remaining 15 months of his life, he knew his great achievements lay behind him--he would be remembered for his discovery of Fitzgerald, his faith in the young Hemingway and his exhausting work with Thomas Wolfe.

Perkins was a rather conservative fellow of solid Yankee stock, and Berg wisely uses accounts of Max's relations with his writers to tell the story. Berg gives the basics of Max's upbringing and personal life but perceives that these can go only so far toward answering just why he demonstrated such an uncanny ability for spotting and remaining faithful to the young men and women who went on to become some of America's finest writers.

Berg for example, is clearly ascinated by Perkin's odd relations with women--describing in detail his platonic ove for Elizabeth Lemmon, his stromy marriage, and his fights with Zelda Fitzgerald and Aline Berstein. Thomas Wolfe's lover--but does not attempt to find in them some secret to Perkins' great eye for fine writers. Rather, Berg simply presents his information about Maxwell Perkins the man, and then moves on to describe his relations with his authors and the conservative elite at Charles Scribners Sons.

With the easy wisdom of hindsight, it is simple enough to cast the young Perkins as the great innovator; and yet, Perkins did not completely share the enthusiasm of writers like Hemingway and Pound for building all literature anew. Perkins, above all, was searching for what Fitzgerald called "the real thing," for Max clung to no dogmatic view of literature and asked only for writing that would vicariously bring readers a little closer to real life.

Perkins found in Fitzgerald a man whose writing captured the spirit of The Jazz Age--even though Perkins was a little skeptical of all those flappers--in Hemingway someone who lived the exciting kind of life that Perkins so admired, and in Wolfe a man who had come to a strong, profound understanding of America and its people.

Above all, Max mistrusted the dry, academic approach to literature. Wolfe, who in You Can't Go Home Again provided the best portrait of Perkins before Berg's book, tells of a conversation Max has with one of his daughters:

"A school is an academic kind of place, you see--and the people that you find in schools are academic people--and these other kind of people--the poets, are not academic people--they're--they're really against what the academic people do--they are people who--who discover things for themselves, who burst through and make another world--and the academic people cannot understand them--so that's why whey the academic people say about them is--is not much good

Lovers of Hemingway. Fitzgerald, Wolfe, Lardner and company will devour Berg's book if for nothing more than the anecdotes about the writers. Though Berg adds little to the voluminous scholarship on these writers, there emerges from Perkins' letters and trivia a picture of the writers maintained over and over again that they didn't give a damn about what the critics said; but they always listened to Perkins' advice and--as the letters show--followed it closely. Perkins, of course, remained equally loyal to his writers, giving a seemingly limitless supply of encouragement, advice and advance money from the often-skeptical folks at Scribners.

Perkins work with Fitzgerald and Wolfe forms the most interesting part of Berg's book. Tales of Fitzgerald's crackup are many, but Berg's picture of Perkins' desparate attempts to save Fitzgerald from his own insecurity is compelling and memorable. And Berg will no doubt find a place for himself among historians of literature for his work on the friendship and eventual estrangement of Perkins and Wolfe--the fiery, romantic writer upon whom Perkins staked much of its reputation.

In Max Perkins: Editor of Genius Berg convincingly argues that it was Perkins' overwhelming sense of loyalty and responsibility to his writers that made him a scrupulous editor and a successful advocate for their cause when his supervisors and fellow editors at Scribners balked. This biography provides an excellent picture of how Perkins, once he discovered a writer, would work to establish him in American letters. Berg, however, does not really address to other side of the problem--just how this man developed a unique eye for spotting fine writers--and it will take a work dealing with more purely literary questions to illuminate that side of this century's most gifted editor.